The Portable Medieval Reader

by James Bruce Ross

  The “Unam Sanctam” of Pope Boniface VIII is a small compendium of the more familiar symbols. The Church is the dove of the Canticle, the spouse of Christ, the body of Christ, the seamless garment. Here also are the two swords, symbols of the spiritual and temporal authorities, although “the priesthood of the sun and the imperium of the moon” were often preferred as symbols in the great conflicts between these powers. To the medieval mind symbolism explained the observed facts of nature in terms of the Christian and eternal facts of life. It exalted and justified both image and concept, supporting them with the weight of tradition and of divine authority.

  But if the cathedrals and tapestries and illuminations are filled with symbolical meaning, the leaves, flowers, and animal forms which decorate them reveal also a loving and accurate observation of nature. This kind of detailed scrutiny of nature is an aspect of that empiricism which was so significant in the development of medieval science and technology. In the long history of man’s peering into the mirror of nature, of his efforts to extract her secrets, to understand and apply them, the contribution of the middle ages was by no means negligible. Adelard of Bath’s “natural questions,” in which he instructed his bumptious nephew, provide an insight into the scientific interests of a twelfth-century scholar, in whose ideas are mingled a naive curiosity and a real comprehension of some scientific principles and problems. Roger Bacon’s concern with the observation of nature and with the development of an experimental science and method are better known than much of the equally important work of his contemporaries and successors, that of Albertus Magnus, for example, in botany and biology, or that of the fourteenth-century physicists.

  An intensely practical and experimental attitude toward everyday life and work, as characteristic of the middle ages as the more theoretical approach, was responsible for those notable advances in technology by which now nameless artisans and inventors helped to revolutionize human habits. Just as the making of forks and of buttons wrought great changes in domestic life, so the invention of spectacles in the late thirteenth century meant that men could now read more and later in life. The form and distribution of reading matter, and every phase of late medieval and modem life, were deeply affected by another kind of domestic revolution. For the process of making paper, which spread from Spain to Italy in the thirteenth century, pulp was required, and the increased use of linen in clothing during the fourteenth century supplied the needed rags. “The siècle de chemise introduced the century of printing.” Although some of its advantages may be debatable, probably no medieval invention has been more important for modern science than that of the mechanical clock, which made possible the precise measurement of time so essential to scientific method.

  In the middle ages, someone has said, almost everyone was always trying to educate or to advise everyone else. The schools, the whole effort of education, like the cathedrals, were expressions of this didactic spirit, at once practical and theoretical. Yet there were no colleges or departments of education, and a large part of the work of instruction was not even carried on in formal schools, but in feudal courts and the workshops of artisans and in the manorial fields; it was an organic part of the social structure. And in keeping with the functional character of society, the training was vocational. Each order and group assumed the responsibility of educating its members, and as in Dotheboys Hall, men learned by doing. The young nobleman, like Jörg von Ehingen, the craftsman, the merchant, the artist, the novice-monk, the student in the university, all served an apprenticeship in their calling, and were ultimately subjected to a test of their ability. The monastery was, par excellence, a “school of the Lord’s service,” but in a sense all education was a school of service, both that of the Lord and of man in society. For in the medieval view, education was moral training, a preparation for the “good life,” and, since the real business of life was salvation, for eternity.

  Like religion, with which it was so closely allied; the educational process pervaded medieval life. The passion for learning and teaching, in its more intellectual aspects, had its formal embodiment first in the monastic and cathedral schools, and then more completely in the universities, which from the thirteenth century on were the workshops of thought and the molds of public opinion. In centers like Paris, Bologna, and Oxford, students from every corner of Christendom were trained as teachers, doctors, lawyers, and theologians, absorbing a curriculum which was a legacy from antiquity, expanded gradually in the earlier middle ages, and more spectacularly in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Here men confronted, in its intellectual forms, the great task of harmonizing a Christian view of things with the ordinary life of man. The advent of “Our Prince,” Aristotle, and his Arabic companions acted as a catalyst, sharpening and intensifying the persistent efforts of medieval thinkers to reconcile complex classical traditions with Christian revelation, to satisfy the demands of both reason and faith. In philosophy and theology, a most comprehensive solution was the massive synthesis of St. Thomas Aquinas. His system was, however, but one of many responses to a challenge which stimulated bold speculation and the most varied currents of thought. The “learned ignorance” of Nicholas of Cusa, emphasizing the primacy of religious experience, reflects the increasing tendency of later medieval thinkers to separate, rather than to harmonize, the domains of reason and faith.

  VI

  According to a fifteenth-century description of the symbolism of arts and sciences, the art of writing should be represented by a “little old man with a strainer in one hand and a written book in the other.” The strainer is an equally appropriate symbol for anthologists, especially for those who boldly attempt to make from the multitudinous records of several centuries a selection that is both discriminating and representative. Our effort has been to seek out some of the best, the most authoritative, vivid, and direct expressions of medieval experience and thought, whether in poetry or prose, familiar or little known, previously translated or not.

  From those sources already available in translation we have drawn gratefully and, we hope, well. But a vast amount of significant material is still accessible only in its original language, either in Latin or in the vernaculars. In some cases where, in our opinion, an important or revealing record was not yet translated, we have tried to remedy the lack. For example, Froissart has written the best-known description of the Battle of Poitiers, but that of Geoffrey le Baker, which we have translated, is the most vivid and accurate. Some works of unique value, hitherto familiar only to scholars, are also represented in our own translations: Hugh of St. Victor’s little guide to study and teaching, so influential throughout the middle ages; the inquisitor’s manual of Bernard Gui, containing perhaps the fullest account of the beliefs and habits of medieval heretics; the history of surgery by an eminent fourteenth-century surgeon, Gui de Chauliac; the treatise on “learned ignorance” of Nicholas of Cusa, the great and too little known churchman and philosopher of the fifteenth century.

  Many of our selections are narrative and descriptive, some are didactic, others are lyric; some are of considerable length and others brief. All have been chosen to speak for themselves, without special comment or explanation. The straining process has often been difficult and sometimes painful, and the limitations of space, of available materials, and of our own knowledge and tastes are responsible for many of those sins of exclusion which often seem more unforgivable than those of inclusion. In general, documentary sources have been avoided; we have used only a few, of great intrinsic interest and general value, such as the bull “Unam Sanctam” of Pope Boniface VIII and selections from the visitation records of the reforming archbishop Odo and from university and municipal records.

  Of the rich imaginative literature of the middle ages, we have sought to include as much as possible and to illustrate both its unique qualities and its varied forms. Because the large body of courtly romance is familiar to most readers, and, in addition, had much the same relation to real life as does modem “soap opera,” we have omitted
all but a small sample in order to have more room for selections from less-known works, such as Piers Plowman, that “first authentic cry of the poor in history.” The great works of medieval literature should be read as a whole and, if possible, in their own language; we have deliberately refrained from making selections from The Divine Comedy and The Canterbury Tales, available in many translations. It is our hope that an acquaintance with the culture of the middle ages from other sources may make these supreme expressions of its spirit more meaningful, and also that the reader who mourns the absence of old favorites may take comfort in finding new ones.

  When, in their own accounts of themselves, the men and women of the middle ages are encountered familiarly and directly, the sense of instant comprehension is often so strong that any barriers between us and them appear insignificant—mere accidents of time and environment, the differences perhaps between the complicated plumbing fixtures of a modem house and the simpler, cruder furnishings of a fifteenth-century manor house. But suddenly we are brought up short by the realization that, although we may meet medieval people on the common ground of humanity, and of much else besides, some of the differences are not accidental and superficial, but really profound. Medieval culture was, as has been said, a distinct one; many of the aspirations and ways of thinking which shaped its life are not those of the modern world. The attempt to understand calls for more than sympathy and imagination; it requires a penetrating insight into the factors which molded this society and held it together, the ideals which dominated it, and the forces which challenged and changed it. The personal records must be set in a larger framework, as the individuals who produced them were parts of a larger whole. An interpretation of medieval culture is both implicit and explicit in the selections and organization of the Medieval Reader; it is, we hope, a valid reflection of what men of those centuries thought about themselves, in harmony with their theories as well as with the actual structure of their society.

  When they discussed the nature, activities, and problems of society, most medieval writers, certainly from the twelfth century on, based their ideas on a simple analogy. They thought of society as a living organism, and compared the functions of its parts with those of the human body. According to the classic statement by John of Salisbury, “a commonwealth is a certain body endowed with life.” The commonwealth, “the whole body of Christians,” is one expression of the unity and universality for which medieval men sought, just as “The Body Social” is another. “Christian Commonwealth” and “Body Social” are really two aspects of the same entity, which was coextensive with the Christian Church in its broadest sense. The place of the Church in medieval society or of society in the Church, depending on the point of view, is one important reason why it is impossible to separate the strands of medieval life along conventional modem lines in political, social, economic, and religious categories. Medieval men, whatever their failures and backslidings, would not have conceived of religion as a separate compartment of human activity. The Church aimed to be, as Tawney says, “not a sect, but a civilization,” and it was in practice a vast institution with universal claims, a system of government and social organization, pervading and deeply involved in every sphere of medieval life.

  To a lesser extent, though in very important ways, the growth of feudal organization, based on loyalty and land, was a unifying force in society. It provided a principle of order in a world of conflicts and struggles, an answer to the needs of men for protection and security, just as the Church, the vessel and means of salvation, cared for the security and salvation of men’s souls, as well as often for their bodies. Both were based on cooperation among men and on the coordination of activity. Both Church and feudal organization were expressions of that striving for order, social, intellectual and spiritual, which is so striking a quality of medieval life.

  According to Boniface VIII, “the law of divinity is to lead the lowest through the intermediate to the highest things. Not, therefore, according to the law of the universe, are all things reduced to order equally and immediately ; but the lowest through the intermediate, the intermediate through the higher.” Society with its hierarchy of orders and ranks of men, the Church and the feudal state with their hierarchies of officials, the structure of lesser corporate bodies such as universities and guilds, and the hierarchy of arts and sciences culminating in theology, reflected, though imperfectly, this eternal order. When men worked, as they frequently did, for the reform of society, they thought of it as “the proper ordering of the spiritual and temporal estates.”

  But though society was in theory and practice closely woven, it was by no means a seamless fabric. It was, as it conceived itself to be, a living organism; it was always changing, challenged and ultimately rent by conflicts and tensions which it sought constantly but with varying success, to harmonize and resolve. The ideal and the actuality, the unity and diversity, the struggle and violence of this society are all illustrated in the sections of this book called “The Body Social” and

  “The Christian Commonwealth,” which are concerned with social and institutional life. They are also manifest in the other parts of our framework, which represent more special aspects of the same whole. In “The House of Fame,” which contains portraits of a few great men and women, this larger whole may be viewed in the microcosm of the individual. The expansion of this society, its mobile and adventurous spirit, its relations with other peoples and cultures, are shown in “The World Picture.” Dante’s conception of “The Noble Castle,” inhabited by the great poets and sages of antiquity, suggested the title of the last section, illustrating “Melodious Musyk, Profound Poetry, and Drawyng of Picture,” the liberal arts and higher sciences, and culminating in the medieval summum bonum, the vision of God.

  vu

  To medieval men, whether consciously or unconsciously, their past was ever present, in the Christian tradition of the Bible and the Fathers, in the ghost of the Roman Empire, in all those “flowering, perfumed, fruitful works of the pagan world” which shaped the humanist tradition. And as H. O. Taylor pointed out, “through the labor of making their inheritance their own, the middle ages produced whatever of lasting value it was their fortune to hand on. No period of human history shows more clearly how little of what goes before is lost in the most signal creations of the human spirit.”

  The magnitude of our own debt to medieval labors and the directness of our ties with this past are evident not only in living institutions, in the products and traditions of art and thought, but less tangibly in common ideals and problems. For we share with medieval men many of the noblest human aspirations, for the brotherhood of man, freedom, the security of human life, unity, and peace. Although their reach often far exceeded their grasp, they made no distinction between ideal and reality. To them the ideal, even if they failed to achieve it, was real.

  Even in the homelier aspects of modem life, we still carry about a great deal of the unconscious baggage of medieval custom and convention, as well as of medieval invention and discovery. In the strangeness of our familiar things, such as the basic form of our letters and numbers, the nursery rhymes of children, in our manners and habits of courtesy, in our trivial sayings, and in many of our common assumptions may be seen permanent marks of the middle ages. When we say firmly that we will do something “by hook or by crook,” do we think of the serf who was allowed to gather only as many sticks in the manorial woodland as he could secure without cutting? When we appeal to a friend for “aid and counsel,” does the origin of the saying in the obligation of feudal lord and vassal flash through the mind? Although most of us are familiar, even though vaguely, with the heliocentric theory, for us, as for men and women of the middle ages, the sun still rises and sets. It is good to remember, too, that the middle ages preserved and illuminated, in both its earthly and its eternal significance, the classic definition of man as a “mortal, rational animal, capable of laughter.”

  The theme of indebtedness, on which this introduction opens, is an a
ppropriate one on which to close. In compiling this reader we have been conscious above all of what we owe to the intellectual stimulation and training of our teachers in the field of medieval studies, at the Universities of Nebraska and Chicago and at Columbia University. To a number of friends and colleagues at Vassar and Wellesley Colleges we wish to express our gratitude, and especially to Professor Henry F. Schwarz of Wellesley College for his generous contributions of original translations of materials on German history. His translation of a large part of the Reformation of the Emperor Sigismund is the only English version of that remarkable document. Special thanks are also due to Smith College, and particularly to Professors Leona C. Gabel and Florence A. Gragg, for permission to use freely excerpts from the translation of The Commentaries of Pius II, which is being published in several installments in the Smith College Studies in History. The extensive search for materials represented in this book was made easier and more pleasant by the interest and cooperation of the staff of the Vassar College Library and by the courtesy of the staff of the Widener Library of Harvard University; to both we express our appreciation. Finally to the patience and industry of Marie Kelley and Elizabeth Salmon, who typed the voluminous manuscript of the book, our warm thanks are due.

  M.M.M. and J.B.R.

  Chromological table 1050-1500 LATER ELEVENTH CENTURY AND TWELFTH CENTURY

  SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING (REVISED, 1997)

  SINCE 1949, when the Medieval Reader first appeared, and especially since 1967, when these suggestions were last revised, the literature on the middle ages has grown enormously, and many works of both general and specialized interest have become more accessible than ever in paperback editions. During recent decades, the expansion of scholarship and interpretation in diverse directions, concerning more varied topics, has fostered both wider perspectives on medieval societies and intensive investigation of large and hitherto neglected aspects of the medieval world. Whatever the lasting outcome of this encompassing activity, the impact of theory and empirical research has enlivened current study and understanding of the middle ages. A glance at this revised list may suggest something of the scope of an enterprise that now embraces women, children, and private life; the poor, prostitutes, criminals, and others on the margins of society; fixes attention on such basic aspects of human life as the body, gender, and sexuality; and poses new questions to medieval sources, including those represented in this collection.